You open your Facebook profile and it is hacked by some internet crooks. You klick on a Twitter link and you launch an attack against FBI. Governments’ websites are being attacked all over Europe for being secretive about ACTA, people fight against non-democratic regimes with help of new media in Lybia and Syria… Besides new actors in cyberwar we have got new democratic actors – cyber activist that are merely social media savvy. What used to be annoying internet behaviour, became crime and police and militaries are looking for new ways to fight cybercrime and to fight in cyberspace.

I looked up some autonomous actors involved in hacking events in the last two monts on Recorded Future application which are neatly stored in one of the analytic views together with the security companies and the hacked victims.

But these individuals are not susceptible to international law, for example to Geneva conventions which professional soldiers must follow. In addition these individuals are not familiar with military ethics, laws of neutrality, might not have clear intent, do not follow the rules of hierarchical organization. Individuals can be persecuted under national criminal law therefore we can understand police pushing for change in criminal law to cover more cyber security threats.



You may easily manipulate Recorded Future application to get data on longer time line, on different type of events or look at them in a neat interactive Google Earth view. I came across different actors, for example hacktivists, patriot hackers, online activists, organized cyber crime, terrorist organizations, and other autonomous actors and it seems to me that individuals became very important for cyber security. Diverse as they are, they can not be called a military and they will hardly take part in a classical armed conflict where one military confronts another. But they are so important that militaries hire them and even offer them to NATO as national cyber troops. Well, Romanian hacktivists apparently disagreed with such a side job.

There is only one truly dangerous motive for cyber attacks: to gain the access to the systems or information important for the national economic or strategic objectives. Access is followed by intentional attack against the confidentiality, the integrity and the availability of information communication technology of a certain country. I do not think that ethical hackers who expose morally unacceptable behaviour or corruption under the masque of anonymity really endanger European critical infrastructure. This is still done by nation states and European countries that follow American example and create cyber commands with cyber soldiers must be aware that nation states stand behind the attacks on critical infrastructures.

Note
Recorded Future is a start up company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s intelligence analysis tools help analysts understand trends in big data by harvesting and indexing unstructured content from more than 50,000 open web sources.